By Libby George
LAGOS, Sept 12 (Reuters) - The International Committee of
the Red Cross (ICRC) wants to connect private investors with
potentially money-making projects in areas blighted by conflict,
its president said on Thursday.
The ICRC head told business leaders in Nigeria's commercial
capital Lagos that it plans to launch five to ten new financing
mechanisms by 2025 in conflict-hit areas around the world where
investors typically would not venture.
Private cash and expertise - via financial mechanisms such
as bonds and direct investment platforms - would give displaced
people long-term access to food, water and shelter without
relying on aid convoys, said ICRC president Peter Maurer.
Ideally, he said, the money could also help them start their
own small businesses or farms.
"With longer, more protracted conflicts ... we need to give
people income opportunities," Maurer said. "Even if they are in
refuge camps, even if they are in (internally displaced person)
camps, they want to do something," he added.
ICRC will use the new financing models around the world, but
Maurer said Nigeria's cash-rich businesses - and conflict-prone
regions - make it an ideal experimental ground.
The decade-long insurgency waged by militant Islamist group
Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria has forced more than 2 million
people to flee their homes in one of the world's worst
humanitarian crises.
Elsewhere, people from Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan are
also facing long-term displacement.
The ICRC said its success with a "Humanitarian Impact Bond"
launched in 2017 prompted it to look at other funding mechanisms
that could pair investors with specific projects. [https://reut.rs/2kc4dEU
Maurer said a water distribution project it built in the
northeast Nigerian city of Maiduguri and an app it developed in
South Sudan to help diagnose diseases in children were both
potentially money-making ventures that could be taken over by
the private sector.
In future, he said the collaboration would enable the
private sector to fund and help guide profitable - and therefore
sustainable - solutions to other basic needs.
The Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Nigerian business mogul
Tony Elumelu are trying to raise the ICRC's profile in Nigeria's
business community.
Elumelu, whose private foundation is already funding an
ICRC-backed entrepreneur project in Nigeria's northeast and
southern Delta regions, said companies need to think of it as a
new way of investing, rather than aid.